Saturday, 31 December 2016

There's something about the New Year isn't there - full of hope for new beginnings on one hand, and on the other, remembrances of past deflated hopes and endings. But still, I think hope for the future is always the more buoyant feeling.

Happy New Year to you all, may it be hopeful and buoyant and bright.

The Year - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

New Year - Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even forty-six but
i am running into a new year and i beg what i
love and
i leave to forgive me

Monday, 26 December 2016

The old year, a tear in the eye of time; frost on the blackthorn, the ditches glamorous with rime; on the inbreath of air,the long, thoughtful pause before snow.

A star on the brow of a mule in a field and the mule nuzzling the drystone wall where a wren, size of a child’s lost purse, hides in a hole. St. Stephen’s Day.

Eight bells from the Church. Next to the Church, the Inn. Next to the Inn, and opposite,a straight furlong of dwellings. End of the line,a farm. Top of the hill, the Big House –

everywhere musky with peat from the first firesas though the hour had started the daywith a neat malt; like your man has herewho bangs on door after door with his holly-stick.

Quick boys! Up for the wren! Then the Wren-Boys flinging open the doors in their green-laced boots,daft caps, red neckerchiefs, with cudgels and nets;one with a cage held aloft on the tip of a ribboned staff.

Wednesday, 21 December 2016

December 21 - Ted KooserPerfectly still this solstice morning, in bone-cracking cold. Nothing moving,or so one might think, but as I walk the road,the wind held in the heart of every treeflows to the end of each twig and forms a bud.

Tuesday, 20 December 2016

'This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future;'

Solstice Poem - Margaret Atwood

I.
Through the slit of our open window, the wind comes in and flows around us, nothingness in motion, like time. The power of what is not there. the snow empties itself down, a shadow turning to indigo, obliterating everything out there, roofs, cars, garbage cans, dead flowerstalks, dog turds, it doesn’t matter. you could read this as indifference on the part of the universe, or else a relentless forgiveness: all of our scratches and blots and mortal wounds and patched-up jobs wiped clean in the snow’s huge erasure.

I feel it as a pressure, an added layer: above the white waterfall of snow thundering down; then attic, moth-balled sweaters, nomadic tents, the dried words of old letters; then stairs, then children, cats and radiators, peeling paint, us in our bed, the afterglow of a smoky fire, our one candle flickering; below us, the kitchen in the dark, the wink of pots on shelves; then books and tools, then cellar and furnace, graying dolls, a bicycle, the whole precarious geology of house crisscrossed with hidden mousetrails, and under that a buried river that seeps up through the cement floor every spring, and the tree roots snouting their slow way into the drains; under that, the bones of our ancestors, or if not theirs, someone’s, mixed with a biomass of nematodes; under that, bedrock, then molten stone and the earth’s fiery core; and sideways, out into the city, street and corner store and mall and underpass, then barns and ruined woodlands, continent and island, oceans, mists of story drifting on the tide like seaweed, animal species crushed and blinking out, and births and illnesses, hatred and love infra- red, compassion fleshtone, prayer ultra- violet; then rumours, alternate waves of sad peace and sad war, and then the air, and then the scintillating ions, and then the stars. That’s where we are.

2.
Some centuries ago, when we lived at the edge of the forest, on nights like this you would have put on your pelt of a bear and shambled off to prowl and hulk among the trees, and be a silhouette of human fears against the snowbank. I would have chosen fox; I liked the jokes, the doubling back on my tracks, and, let’s face it, the theft. Back then, I had many forms: the sliding in and out of my own slippery eelskin, and yours as well; we were each other’s iridescent glove, the deft body all sleight-of-hand and illusion. Once we were lithe as pythons, quick and silvery as herring, and we still are, momentarily, except our knees hurt. Right now we’re content to huddle under the shed feathers of duck and goose as the wind pours like a river we swim in by keeping still, like trout in a current. Every cell in our bodies has renewed itself so many times since then, there’s not much left, my love, of the originals. We’re footprints becoming limestone, or think of it as coal becoming diamond. Less flexible, but more condensed; and no more scales or aliases, at least on the outside. Though we’ve accumulated, despite ourselves, other disguises: you as a rumpled elephant— hide suitcase with white fur, me as a bramble bush. Well, the hair was always difficult. Then there’s the eye problems: too close, too far, you’re a blur. I used to say I’d know you anywhere, but it’s getting harder.

3.
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar.

Taking hands like children lost in a six-dimensional forest, we step across. The walls of the house fold themselves down, and the house turns itself inside out, as a tulip does in its last full-blown moment, and our candle flares up and goes out, and the only common sense that remains to us is touch,

as it will be, later, some other century, when we will seem to each other even less what we were. But that trick is just to hold on through all appearances; and so we do, and yes, I know it’s you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it’s even darker than It is now, when the snow is colder, when it’s darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: Yes. It’s still you. It’s still you.

Monday, 19 December 2016

A very relevant poem for our current situation in the world, and to begin my poetry posting for Christmas week.

Advent - Antony Dunnfor Daisy or MiloO little child, o child to comeknocking at the world's door, for whom,still, your small universe of wombis all there is to know, strike dumbthe voices of our worldly gloom;no room, no room, no room.
O little child, make good the sumof human love. Of every crumbcreate a thousand shares. Presumethis much, at least, that there's one homefrom which the answer will not come,no room, no room, no room.

Monday, 5 December 2016

At sundown when a day's words
have gathered at the feet of the trees
lining up in silence
to enter the long corridors
of the roots into which they
pass one by one thinking
that they remember the place
as they feel themselves climbing
away from their only sound
while they are being forgotten
by their bright circumstances
they rise through all of the rings
listening again
afterward as they
listened once and they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning

Friday, 25 November 2016

Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.
And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.

Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.

Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.
But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.
The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.
The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.
Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.

Sunday, 20 November 2016

'and, like a needle slipped into your vein—that sudden rush of the world...'

Any Common Desolation - Ellen Bass

can be enough to make you look upat the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the fewthat survived the rains and frost, shotwith late afternoon sun. They glow a deeporange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single birdwould rip it like silk. You may have to breakyour heart, but it isn’t nothingto know even one moment alive. The soundof an oar in an oarlock or a ruminantanimal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.Warm socks. You remember your mother,her precision a ceremony, as she gatheredthe white cotton, slipped it over your toes,drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breathcan uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everythingyou dread, all you can’t bear, dissolvesand, like a needle slipped into your vein—that sudden rush of the world.

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Hard not to think about death in this bleak month of winter beginning. Linda Pastan sums it up sharply.

November - Linda Pastan

It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.
In a later scene,
or earlier,
the trees like gnarled magicians
produce handkerchiefs
of leaves
out of empty branches.

And we watch.
We are like children
at this spectacle
of leaves,
as if one day we too
will open the wooden doors
of our coffins
and come out smiling
and bowing
all over again.

Friday, 11 November 2016

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair —
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise —
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.

Poetry lovers, loathers or newbies - I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment by clicking on comments below a postand signing in with your Google ID, blog/website or Anonymous if these do not apply. Or feel free to email me at siobhanbsb@hotmail.com

The poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~ Carl Sandburg

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. ~Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor

"Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like the fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.'"~ Janet Fitch, 'White Oleander'

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the development of an exclamation. ~Paul Valery

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. - Anne Sexton

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? ~ Emily Dickinson

The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge